“What we have is a weird, shadow nationalization,” said Karen Shaw Petrou, managing partner at Federal Financial Analytics, a consulting firm in Washington. “The government does not want to and should not want to own banks. But if they get forced into that situation, they should resolve that situation. Here, what you have is a huge diversified financial services industry with recognized losses and looming losses in every aspect of its operations. Theres nothing straightforward about it.”

The approximately $120 billion aid package on Thursday for Bank of America  including injections of capital and absorbed losses  as well as a $300 billion package in November for Citigroup both represented displays of financial gymnastics aimed at providing capital without appearing to take commanding equity stakes.

Treasury and Fed officials accomplished that trick by structuring the deals like insurance programs for big bundles of the banks most toxic assets.

Instead of investing tens of billions of taxpayer dollars in exchange for preferred shares in the banks, which has been the Treasury Departments approach so far with its capital infusions, the government essentially liberated the banks from some of their most threatening assets.

The trouble with the new approach, analysts say, is that it is likely to conceal the amount of risk that taxpayers are taking on. If the government-guaranteed securities turn out to be worthless, the cost of the insurance would be much higher than if the Treasury Department had simply bailed out the banks with cash in the first place.

But a growing number of analysts warned that the approach may be too clever, because it gives policy makers too many ways to conceal true problems at banks and true risks to taxpayers.

What we have is a weird, shadow nationalization, said Karen Shaw Petrou, managing partner at Federal Financial Analytics, a consulting firm in Washington. The government does not want to and should not want to own banks. But if they get forced into that situation, they should resolve that situation. Here, what you have is a huge diversified financial services industry with recognized losses and looming losses in every aspect of its operations. Theres nothing straightforward about it.